Sep 12, 2013

A startup accelerator for the world’s poorest

There’s an opportunity emerging that I’m compelled to explore, and I’ve written about it on Medium.

If kids in poor Ethiopian villages can teach themselves to hack a tablet in 4 months, it makes sense to support them like we do in Western startup accelerators. With mobile adoption in Asia and Africa, the timing is right. With the economic trends working in their favour, they are investible. I want to do this, and I need your help.

Read the full post on medium.com and please join the discussion on Hacker News.

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I'm Salim Virani. I've been designing peer learning programs since 2009, and these days I'm also having fun building random stuff.

In the past, I designed peer learning programs for Oxford, UCL, Techstars, Microsoft Ventures and The Royal Academy Of Engineering. I also played a role in creating the Lean Startup methodology, and the European startup ecosystem. You can read about this here.

What am I up to these days?

I’m working on a communication tool for community groups and unconferences. It focuses on autonomising focused teams rather than top-down coordination.

I’m on the Kernel Stewards team, where we help ~2,000 fellows understand the what the development of blockchains mean to humanity on anthropological scales, and how to use them altruistically and prudently.

Books & collected practices

  • Peer Learning Is - a broad look at peer learning around the world, and how to design peer learning to outperform traditional education
  • Mentor Impact - researched the practices used by the startup mentors that really make a difference
  • DAOistry - practices and mindsets that work in blockchain communities
  • Decision Hacks - early-stage startup decisions distilled
  • Source Institute - skunkworks I founded with open peer learning formats and ops guides, and our internal guide on decentralised teams

Random Projects

  • Cuppa - decentralised collaboration protocol (WIP)
  • Nonfungo - completely on-chain NFT sale notification bot for Discord. (Look ma! No Opensea API!)
  • Powerplays - real-time token launches

Other thoughts

What do you need right now? (2023)

Making sense of DAOs (2022)

An Agile starter pack for DAOs (2022)

Building ecosystems with grant programs (2021)

Safe spaces make for better learning (2021)

Choose happiness (2021)

Working 'Remote' after 10 years (2020)

Emotional Vocabulary (2020)

Project portfolios (2020)

Expectations (2019)

Amperage - the inconvenient truth about energy for Africa's off-grid. (2018)

The history Of Lean Startup (2016)

Three Skinheads are running at me, and all I can think to say is, “Here Dan, hold my kebab for a sec.” (2016)

Get your loved ones off Facebook (2015)

Entrepreneurship is craft (2014)

Peter Thiel vs the science fiction masters (2013)

Here's more...

Contact me